I recall being able to access the equivalent of 'Settings' in Vista without it crashing constantly.

Speaking of installed-by-default, it's even more stupid that you can't even uninstall apps like Photos. Supposedly it's 'required for your Mac to function.' I'm sorry, I do not have a need for a photo library on a computer used exclusively to write software.

+1 I dont understand why Macos cant be more like iOS

Unrelated, but I wish they merged macOS and iOS into the best of both, but... they would probably make macOS worse if they tried

> Apple Music is just an advertisement by default and "conveniently" opens every sound file mimetype

Not only that, but you get the advertisement every time it starts and then it doesn't play the actual file. So unless you join the service the process is: try to open the audio file, close the advert, go back to source, open the file again.

Agreed the default experience is bad. You can however change the default app for each of the relevant file types. I’ve set my default to be iina

Slight tangent: Apple TV constantly has MLS (major league soccer) and Apple TV+ in the left-side pop up Home menu, taking up real-estate for something I will never access. So annoying.

Why, as someone from England — with arguably the best football league in the world — would I want to watch American Soccer? I don’t even watch the English league.

The menu is:

———————

* Search

* Home

* Apple TV+

* MLS

* Store

* Library

———————

Title: Channels & Apps

* This is where all the channels I have actually opted for live — separate from the Apple products that I don’t want

———————

Both Apple TV+ and MLS should not be on that menu permanently. And it should be possible to turn them off.

> Why, as someone from England — with arguably the best football league in the world — would I want to watch American Soccer? I don’t even watch the English league.

So you're the type that doesn't watch the Special Olympics I take it? MLS is the geriatric retirement league for super star players, or the not quite good enough to play in the other leagues league. One season, I tried to get into MLS. At one point I tried using a stop watch to clock how much time the ball was out of play in MLS compared to "real" leagues, and it was close to 20% which is not far away from amateur kids level of play.

I don't blame you for not liking the MLS branding. However, I'm guessing they paid a couple of shiny coins for that privilege, so they're naturally going to try to do anything to recoup that money

I don’t watch football at all. If it’s not cricket… well it ain’t cricket!

But even if it was a channel dedicated to test cricket (the greatest sport in the history of sport), I would still resent the foisting. These are clearly anti-competitive practices and that always leads to worse products eventually.

I agree that it's weird that Apple TV comes pre-installed. The others I have less experience with so I can't really comment on them.

you might like https://github.com/philocalyst/infat to change the mimetypes associations

I might prefer respectful default apps that delight the user and don't cost anything more than what I paid for at checkout.

MacOS isn't for me, I guess.

I hear you, but 10y of MacOS usage habit will make that to you, it's easier for me to work around MacOS quirks and Apple's authoritarianism than it is to try and get a Linux distro I like to work perfectly for me for more than 6 months, or worse, go back to win

> iCloud nags never go away if you don't log into iCloud

I don't get people who buy macs and refuse to login to iCloud.

You don't have to use iCloud for storage or anything else, all that can be disabled in settings.

The biggest benefit of logging into iCloud is protection if your device gets stolen. It means the thiefs can't just wipe and resell your device. It means you can track and remote-wipe it in Find My.

Sometimes I consider looking switching back to MacOS (left because OS X 10.7 was becoming too much like iOS and I don't like the idea of apps having to be signed and/or in an app store) and holy shit I am glad I left.

it's still better than windows. Compared to Gnome or KDE one could argue either way

For development work, I honestly prefer Windows. At least WSL knows what you want to do and gets out of the way. Comparatively, making a "correct" shell on MacOS often entails QEMU and local NAS, alt-tabbing between that and your native terminal for version control. Or you build your server software to be MacOS-native for debugging and port it to Linux later like a neanderthal.

Just... no. MacOS looks pretty but the workflow is uglier than Satan's taint. I don't get paid to work around Apple's dysfunction.

I did Linux for a bit, but I was really impressed with Windows 10 once I disabled all the junk. Good window management, WSL is fantastic, I really like a few windows-specific utilities, and programs. I like having the Adobe suite + a nix env.

That being said, Windows 11 is making me consider jumping back to Linux, along with me being increasingly annoyed by Adobe.